Thursday, April 30, 2009

Compressed data is a simple and very effective way to improve web site usability. See some statistics here for example.Compress filter from JSOS solves this task for Java web applications. The latest version supports also both client-side and server-side cache. So you can for example compress some big file only once and serve all the sub-sequential requests right from the cache.

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Some of the popular Twitter applications (Twittelator, TwitPic) let you automatically publish geo location with the status changes. This location information looks like a short link (e.g. via bit.ly service) pointing to the appropriate google map.

And here is a Java (and/or Coldfusion) component lets you deal with such location info - GPS location. Custom JSP taglib lets you decrypt location link and extract coordinates (latitude, longitude) from it, or vice versa – create such a link for the given coordinates.And here is a real example: Twitter mashup lets you publish some location right from the Google Maps - Twitter location. Just click on the map.

Saturday, April 25, 2009

At the very bottom of many web pages, you'll see a like that states: "This page was generated in X.XX seconds." This is measured by a little snippet of timing code. Here is an example of that code for JSP (and/or Coldfusion). In other words is is a practical "how to" measure the page generation time.

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Using AT command you can easily turn your mobile phone into SMS gateway for example. We wrote about this already. But the interesting thing that you can extend this approach to the voice calls also. Here is an experiment:

Hardware:Mobile phone Sony Ericsson K320iUSB Data cable

Software: any application capable read/write serial port.

The following command AT*ECAM=1 switch on call monitoring. So for any incoming call you will get ECAV messages describes a type for the call (e.g. voice call) as well as a phone number for the second party. So actually you can develop some telecom services using your mobile phone as a telecom platform

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

A proxy for the remote content – Dump servlet. Let us see the typical case – you are linking to the image on the other site. Yes - it is so called hotlinking. You are eating the traffic from that site. Dump servlet in this case lets you request the remote content only once – during the first call. After that it will be cached and served right from your host. Another possible use case for this servlet is a cache for the remote CGI scripts. Actually servlet supports both – client side and server side caches.

Share your address info via QR-code. A widget for Opera lets you create QR code with your address data so it is just a matter of one click for the partner to get your full and correct address data right for the own phone. See and download here MECARD widget.

Monday, April 06, 2009

One of the popular components in JSOS - Image Scale servlet obtains an extended functionality. This servlet lets you scale the images on the fly. And you can do that for the local images (images within your web applications) as well as for the remote images:

/servlet/ImageScale?/mybigpic.gif

or

/servlet/ImageScale?/http://some_host/mybigpic.gif

Servlet supports both server side and client side cache. You can save the scaled images on your server so next time they will be served to the users right from the cache as well as provide Expires header for client side cache.